Close coupling of a MIMD system to a MAXbus pipeline -- the Kiwivision MTM multi-transputer architecture

This paper describes the Kiwivision Multi-Transputer Module which has been developed at Industrial Research Limited. It is a MIMD architecture which is tightly coupled to external hardware compatible with the MAXbus^TM pipeline standard. The features of Kiwivision are described with particular emphasis given to its inter-processor connectivity and data handling abilities. An implementation of the 2D Fast Fourier Transform is used to illustrate the data movement strengths of the design. Keywords: MIMD, MISD, multi-processor, transputer, pipeline processing 1. INTRODUCTION High-speed machine vision systems frequently need to be capable of performing a wide variety of algorithms, from low-level pixel based operations such as convolution to higher-level functions such as object recognition. To achieve such a diverse range of functions places conflicting requirements on the system architecture. Two architectures frequently used are MISD (Multiple-Instruction--Single-Data) or MIMD (Multip...